It’s the 101st anniversay of Bloomsday, and I think I’m right in remembering that 16 June fell on a Thursday in 1904, too. What a day. What a book. What a guy (Joyce or Bloom, according to taste).
On a day that the Archbish gave us some of his John-Lloyd-fuelled thoughts about the media, I’ll leave you with Chris Miller’s image to illustrate “Aeolus“, from his excellent (but still unfinished) Ulysses Project.
Imre Nagy, Prime Minister of Hungary, hero of 1956, condemned for Right Deviationism and deposed by Krushchev’s tanks; born in Kaposv�r, Hungary 7 June 1896, hanged in Budapest, June 16, 1958.
Harry Pollitt, general secretary of the CPGB, born 22 November 1890, died 16 June 1960.
Lyrics of and handy info about the Ballad of Harry Pollitt are here [via].
Some people are reporting difficulties with the comments boxes right now, especially, I think, for Firefox users. Please be patient. I hope it’ll sort itself out soon. Sometimes reloading the page with ctrl-R or whatever it is seems to work.
I haven’t really been paying attention to this, either (and I’ve never been to a match), but when I first heard about this, I thought it sounded like a good thing, and the first England vs Australia match of the Summer is being piped through the radio behind me and sounds quite fun (especially since three four Australians have just been dismissed in the last three four minutes or so, and any form of cricket in which you can dismiss three four Australians in three four minutes would seem to have something important going for it. So if more knowledgeable people could tell me whether 20/20 is any good or not, or whether it’s just the usual one-day crappiness and that I’m letting optimism trump good judgment (again), that’d be useful.
UPDATE [9pm] Hmm. These Australians don’t seem to be very good at this, do they?
UPDATE [16.6.2005]: And there’s more.
I wasn’t really paying attention over the last few days, but here’s a piece from Saturday’s Guardian by historian Tristram Hunt which appears to be mostly about TC CBE ex-MP. It contains some criticism of the great man’s opinions, though, so do give it a wide berth if you’re one of his more sensitive admirers.
(Jamie has more.)
Stuart Hampshire, philosopher, socialist and Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, born 1 October 1914, died 13 June 2004.
The Times says this in one of its leader columns today:
Grey hair and gravitas win votes; even the bald do better than the cherubic. In last year’s US elections, the candidate perceived as more competent won in 71 per cent of the senate races. And perception often amounts to no more than a subliminal blink at a poster or television image. Does this mean that, without lavish application of a reverse Grecian 2000 formula, David Cameron will never wear the Tory leader’s mantle? Is this why Tim Collins and Stephen Twigg, whose youthful round faces show little careworn sign of etiolated angst, lost their seats?
The answer to this last question, incidentally, is “No, in both cases.”
It’s strangely satisfying to learn that while I was sitting in the Bodleian Library this afternoon reading James Tyrrell’s 1693 Brief Disquisition of the Law of Nature (very dull) and Samuel Parker’s 1681 Demonstration of the Divine Authority of the Law of Nature and of the Christian Religion (much more interesting), the usual suspects were discussing natural law theory over at Harry’s (David T isn’t a fan).
Well, I was reading in the English, Protestant, slightly-voluntarist, late-seventeenth-century variety of natural law theory, whereas the discussion over there, when it isn’t about gay marriage, is about the transformation of more straightforwardly Thomist theory at the hands of people like Finnis, Glendon, and B-16. But that’s close enough for the World of Blogs.
If people want to carry on organising their blog discussions around what I’m reading, tomorrow would be a good day for an argument about the changing character of Dutch republicanism in the middle of the seventeenth century, as I work through the second half of Blom’s book (see below). Good luck!
I’m sitting in the Bodleian Lower Reading Room reading Hans W. Blom’s Morality and Causality in Politics: The Rise of Naturalism in Dutch Seventeenth-Century Political Thought when I see that Sarah has dug a hole for me and passed me the spade. Where better to think about books than in the LRR of the B? OK then, very quickly:
1) Total number of books I’ve owned: Thousands, I’m afraid. I don’t spend much money on anything else, and it’d take me too long to make a sensible estimate, especially if it involves books I used to own but don’t any more, for whatever reason.
2) The last book I bought: Probably a critical edition of Paradise Lost, which I’m enjoying (though haven’t got especially far yet).
3) The last book I read: Making Sense of Suicide Missions, ed. Diego Gambetta. Good book.
4) Five books that mean a lot to me (no particular order): Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue; Njal’s Saga; Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose; Arnold Lobell, Owl at Home; Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900.
5) People to Tag: No-one in particular. Sorry if you should have liked to have been tagged by me.
You can read about it here (and scroll down).
We have a Tim-Collins-Watch over here, and months later the man loses his seat. It’s replaced by a Laurent-Fabius-Watch, and within days he’s expelled from the Socialists’ executive committee. The Curse of the Stoa hasn’t been this potent since the rugby world cup.
… Socialism in an Age of Waiting. They’ve done a disappearing act before, but this one has got some solid reasons behind it (though Canada is on the internet, last time I looked), and it really could be the case this time round that an open-ended break becomes, well, open-ended. A pity.
György Lukács, Hungarian Marxist, author of History and Class Consciousness and other good books. Born 13 April 1885, died 4 June 1971.
(Not to be confused with George Lucas.)
So I’m sitting at home dealing with an email backlog, and the Test Match isn’t very good, but I still want it on anyway, because I’m like that, but we don’t seem to be getting Sky Sports through our telly cable thingy anymore, so I have Radio Five Live coming through the telly, and it turns out that if you have the Radio Five Live coverage you don’t get the interruptions for the Shipping Forecast (which is only on Radio Four Longwave), and have to listen to the commentators’ wittering nonsense through the drinks break.
The Shipping Forecast is one of life’s small but real pleasures, and one of the only reasons to stay Home rather than heading off to live Abroad. (Though I dare say you can get the Shipping Forecast on R4 LW in Northern France.) What have we done to be deprived of it here on Radio Five Live?
(Some of us still haven’t forgotten or forgiven about Finisterre.)
About half of this piece by David Lawday in the New Statesman discusses the Stoa’s éléphant du choix.
Arthur Ransome, author of Six Weeks in Russia, The Crisis in Russia, Swallows and Amazons and other fine books; born in Leeds, 18 January 1884, died 3 June 1967. Discussion of just what he was doing during the Russian Revolution here.
Big piece on alpacas in today’s Guardian (though you have to look at p.3 of the print edition for the photo). A bit of local bother in Gloucestershire, I’m afraid.
There are now twelve thousand alpacas in the UK. That’s a lot of alpacas, and I’m very pleased to be sharing my multi-national homeland with all of them. Lots more info over here.
In an effort to kick-start the Laurent-Fabius-Watch, in which the Virtual Stoa will track its man all the way from referendum victory in 2005 to the Elysée in 2007 (or not, as the case may be), Dan sends me a summary of the latest developments in the French Press:
* Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a likely rival for the socialist nomination for President in 2007 is sticking the knife in with a suggestion in an
interview with Le Monde that Fabius should be removed from his position as no.2 in the Socialist party hierarchy.
* Meanwhile, Claude Bartolone, a Fabius sidekick, is counter-suggesting that he should be promoted to lead the PS’s preparations for 2007 — though stopping just short of calling for him to replace Fran�ois Hollande as the Party’s First Secretary — according to this piece in Libération, which has the splendid phrase in it, “A troika of elephants”.
More soon, probably.
A friend alerts me to this diary piece in yesterday’s Independent:
* The sad death of Patsy Calton, the Liberal Democrat MP for Cheadle, has already set Westminster buzzing with talk of a by-election.One man in the running for the knife-edge poll is Tim Collins, the former Tory frontbencher, who lost his seat (also in the North-West) to the Lib Dems at the general election.
Collins has previously told friends that his preferred route back onto the Conservative benches would not be a by-election, since “he’d prefer to go through a normal selection process”.
The marginal Cheadle (maj 4,000) will be tempting, though: it offers a chance for revenge on the party that booted him out of office, and would catapult Collins, a Harry Potter lookalike, into the thick of power-broking over his party’s leadership.
Not meaning to be macabre, etc., but why did the Lib Dems pick these various candidates on the brink of death to fight their seats? Was it just a Midlands/North-West thing, or were they doing it all over the country? Perhaps we’ll find out over the next few weeks and months.
From today’s Guardian, in a piece about what happens to those who lose their seats at election time:
I had hoped to talk to Tim Collins, former shadow education spokesman and the most prominent of the Tories who lost on May 5, but he too has gone to ground. “His defeat was totally unexpected,” says a press spokesman at Conservative campaign HQ. “He has had many requests for interviews, but has declined them all.” Little wonder: Collins is 41, a politician from the cradle, living and breathing the Westminster air. He has not just lost his job; he has lost his oxygen supply.
Has Tim Collins never had a proper job? (The things I still don’t know about this enigmatic man! But, hang on, what did he get his CBE for, if not for something not-entirely-politics-related? He might not be Tim Collins CBE MP anymore, but he is still Tim Collins CBE.)There are signs at Borders bookshop in Oxford advertising a forthcoming appearance by Tim Collins, but, sadly, it’s not the Tim Collins of the Stoa, but another chap with the same name.
John Dewey, American pragmatist, born 20 October 1859, died 1 June 1952.
Dewey has been honoured this week by having his book, Democracy and Education, included on a list of the “Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries” produced by a team of conservative intellectuals at Human Events Online. It comes in at #5, less wicked than the Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf, The Little Red Book and Kinsey, but more wicked than Capital, The Feminine Mystique, Auguste Comte, Beyond Good and Evil and Keynes’s General Theory, with John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty coming in a disappointing fourteenth and failing to make the list.
